Service for Chris

Today was the service for Chris V. It was at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, and was a nice affair. The chapel is attractive and our 60 or so mourners managed to fill it sufficiently that it felt well-attended.

T. gave a very beautiful eulogy that was heartwarming and personal, and reminded us of what they'd lost.

Mark M. also offered a nice eulogy, and one that particularly amused me in one part. He talked about grilling hamburgers at Chris' place one day, and burning them terribly. He said that he took one bite and realized it was inedible, and he looked over and saw that Chris was already three bites in to his own burger. He attributed it to Chris being too polite to say anything, but I suspect it was just Chris being oblivious. I guess we each see what we expect.

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After the service the saturday gamers and I returned to my house where we drank and played games. Chris, who often brought hard lemonade to my board game nights, would have enjoyed it.

I was happy to have a decent set of games that play very well at 6-8. We played Formula D, Shadows Over Camelot and Havoc: The Hundred Years War.

Now the day is done, and the rest of us will wake up tomorrow and move on with our lives.

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Yesterday I dug out the guest book from Kimberly & my's wedding. I was looking to see if Chris had written anything that I could pass on to T., who was working on his eulogy.

Chris' note was funny, something that I didn't give him credit for enough, and I enjoyed seeing it again, but it wasn't anything that I passed on.

What did strike, me, however, as I paged through that guestbook is that the four people who I know who died in 2008 had all written us notes there; every one was at our wedding or our picnic afterward: Betty Wiedlin, Bob Pepelka, Rory Root, Chris Van Horn.

Not a good year.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken

This afternoon I finished Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken. It's a political book that dissects many of the lies that so many public Republicans tell (from Hannity to Bush). Like the movie Recount it was something I'd been interested in before but didn't feel able to deal with until after the election.

It was an OK book, funny at parts, but not spectacular.

What struck me the most was the longest chapter in the book, which was about the late, marvelously progressive Senator Paul Wellstone. Franken took real offense at the dishonest campaign waged by Wellstone's Republican opponent and the Republican party in general both before and after Wellstone's untimely death (which occurred just weeks before the election).

Of course the scummy Republican who waged that scummy campaign was ... Norm Coleman.

Who I think we can now pretty definitively say that Al Franken beat in one of the closest elections of our time. The rest of the Republicans may well try and sit on Franken's getting seated for a couple of months--but it turns out not to matter until a valid appointment is made in Illinois (short reason: because the filibuster-blocking number is at 59 votes for 98 senators, but 60 for 99 or 100 ... of course Harry Reid needs to find a backbone and make those Republicans actually read the phonebook if they want to try and block the legislation we Americans want rather than just continuing to allow them "painless" procedural filibusters).

In any case, it was nice to read about Franken's ties to and feelings about Wellstone, because it helps to tell the story of why he decided to run in 2008 for the Senate seat that used to belong to his friend (though it was written 5 years before he did so).